agriculture

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May 20, 2013 | 12:00 PM | By  | 

The promise and pitfalls in efforts to reform US foreign food aid | 

Haitians Receive Boxes of USAID Food Aid
Haitians Receive Boxes of USAID Food Aid
USAID

Food aid reforms came under the spotlight last month when the Obama Administration announced its Fiscal Year 2014 budget.

The changes are important to humanitarian response. Oxfam America estimates that reforms to food aid procurement laws could speed up crisis response by 14 weeks and reach an additional 17.1 million people. For a crisis like the 2010 drought in the Horn of Africa, that improved response time could have saved thousands of lives.

“The current approach to food aid can become, at times, an impediment to its very own mission,” said USAID Administrator Raj Shah.

Humanitarian groups were mostly supportive in response and contractors were unhappy that changes would affect their business. What looked like positive momentum for reform is starting to slow down as both houses of Congress take a look at the Farm Bill and food aid reform both in and out of the United States.

“The agriculture industry in the Midwest sees this as a threat to exports, which is ridiculous,” said former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios to Businessweek, a supporter of food aid reform during his tenure with the Bush Administration. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Africa, agriculture, drought, Feed the Future, food aid, food for peace, Horn of Africa, Oxfam, Raj Shah, reform
March 26, 2013 | 11:20 AM | By  | 

African agriculture threatened by funding drought & bad trade policies | 

tanzaniawomen
Morgana Wingard

African countries are making promising agricultural gains, but the progress remains in the balance due to a $4.4 billion funding shortfall, warns a new report by the ONE Campaign. That is in addition to $11 billion in agriculture funding pledged by G8 nations that has yet to be disbursed.

The ONE report cites 2013 as an important year for agriculture in Africa because it is a time when international and domestic funding agreements come to an end.

“African leaders have the opportunity to deliver on their goals of lifting millions from extreme poverty and hunger and preventing chronic malnutrition by meeting these commitments,” write the report’s authors.

Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina was generally supportive of the report, but noted that the problem of agriculture may be one that is about markets rather than production.

“There is no discussion on the massive rate of loss between farm gate and market in this region,” said Carr. “The report raises further questions. Is there really a production shortfall or a marketable crop shortfall?” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Africa, agriculture, AU, Ethiopia, food, Nutrition, ONE
October 1, 2012 | 11:30 AM | By  | 

Q&A with an architect of the Gates-funded ‘green revolution’ for Africa | 

Flickr, agrforum

Kofi Annan and Melinda Gates at 2012 African Green Revolution Forum, Tanzania

While Bill Gates was in New York City to stump for polio eradication at last week’s ‘high-level’ side meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Melinda Gates was attending another fairly high-level meeting in Arusha, Tanzania – the African Green Revolution Forum.

One of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s top priorities is to improve agricultural productivity and the lives of smallholder farmers in Africa, where crop yields have historically been much lower than elsewhere in the world contributing to much of the continent’s poverty. Most Africans are smallholder farmers, most farmers are women and most are poor.

With former United Nations Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kofi Annan as its leading spokesman, the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

It hasn’t been without controversy.

To begin with, the term “Green Revolution” comes with baggage. The first Green Revolution was an agricultural reform initiative led half a century ago by an amazing agricultural scientist named Norman Borlaug and pushed by the Rockefeller Foundation aimed at improving crop yields in poor countries.

That first Green Revolution in the 1950s and ’60s did improve yields dramatically in many regions of the world, saving lives and ending hunger. But it also promoted a Western-style, industrialized approach to agriculture that favored large-scale monoculture crops and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This had the adverse effect of knocking many smallholder farmers off their land in favor of corporate farming, caused environmental problems and actually sometimes increased costs for farmers. The lesson: Improving crop yield isn’t everything.

Also, Africa got skipped over in the first Green Revolution.

So when the Gates Foundation announced a few years back that it was sponsoring a second Green Revolution for Africa, many took them as fighting words. Organizations like Seattle-based AGRA Watch is a leading critic of the Gates approach and has organized protests focused on the philanthropy’s partnerships with big agri-businesses like Monsanto.

Gates Foundation

Roy Steiner

Roy Steiner is deputy director for agriculture in the development program at the Gates Foundation. Roy, who as been there since before the philanthropy dug into the dirt, has degrees in all sort of things from all sorts of major universities. He has lived in Africa and worked on a number of projects, both agricultural and technological, and went to the meeting last week in Tanzania as well.

I asked Roy to explain where they are with this ‘green revolution’ for Africa, what it is the world’s biggest philanthropy is trying to do for poor farmers and why it remains controversial.

Q Why is the idea of launching a ‘green revolution’ for Africa so controversial?

RS: I think it’s more problematic in the north than in Africa. Many African leaders want a green revolution. They want to be able to feed their people and move away from food aid. The first green revolution did cause some significant social, economic and environmental problems and we don’t want to repeat those problems.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Science, Africa, AGRA, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, development, green revolution, Roy Steiner
September 13, 2012 | 12:00 PM | By  | 

South African critic of Gates-funded ‘green revolution for Africa’ speaks in Seattle tonight | 

Lawrence Mkhaliphi

Lawrence Mkhaliphi is a farmer, agro-ecologist and South African activist opposed to the efforts of a Gates Foundation-funded initiative called AGRA, or the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

“The approach they have taken benefits large corporations and outsiders, not poor communities in Africa,” says Mkhaliphi, who says the issue of local ‘food sovereignty’ must be emphasized in these efforts to improve African agriculture — not just agricultural productivity alone.

“They (AGRA) are undermining local people’s power over their own livelihoods, over the ability to promote local solutions,” he contended in a brief discussion I had with him yesterday. “This will only make them poorer, with less control over their lives.”

Mkhaliphi, who is a leading member of an advocacy organization Biowatch South Africa, is on a U.S. tour and is speaking tonight under sponsorship by the Seattle organization AGRA Watch — which is also opposed to the efforts of AGRA and, generally, to what they perceive to be a Western, industrialized agricultural strategy imposed on Africa.

For more details about the event tonight, at 7 pm in Seattle’s Madison neighborhood, go here.

 

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, AGRA, AGRA Watch, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
May 21, 2012 | 2:51 PM | By  | 

Corruption investigation of key player in Obama’s plan to fight African hunger | 

Flickr, aed10e

Maybe this is getting so little media attention because it’s in Norway.

At any rate, it’s worth noting because:

Last week, at the opening of the G8 conference hosted by the United States, President Barack Obama announced a $3-billion, largely private sector plan aimed at fighting hunger in Africa.

Some celebrated it as a welcome initiative by the world’s wealthiest nations — a big win in the effort to reduce hunger in sub-Saharan Africa and a move that will “lift 50 million people out of poverty.” Obama said he regarded the public-private partnership, dubbed the National Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, as a “moral imperative.”

Others saw it more as a punt, an attempt to divert attention from the failure of the G8 nations to live up to earlier commitments of food aid and to deflect responsibility over to the private sector — to agri-business firms which already have commercial reasons to invest in Africa, some of which may do little to alleviate the plight of poor farmers.

Now we learn that the top player on Obama’s private sector plan to fight hunger in Africa is under criminal investigation over allegations of corruption – bribes paid to foreign officials.

According to the Obama Administration, specifically the U.S. Agency for International Development, as much as $2 billion of their $3 billion initiative is based on a plan by a Norwegian firm, Yara International, to build a fertilizer plant in Africa (location unspecified).

Little noticed so far are a few news reports of the Norwegian government’s investigation of Yara for criminal corruption — bribes paid to gain foreign contracts. The Wall Street Journal reported today that two Yara executives have stepped down (well, over really … since they kept their jobs) due to the probe. This, the WSJ notes, is the third corruption investigation of Yara and its work overseas.

Oxfam, which has worked to fight both hunger and corruption in Africa, noted that the Sahel region is heading right now into a food crisis and that the international community has not responded fully to this crisis.

A number of international aid advocacy organizations have criticized the Obama private-sector plan as both inadequate and irresponsible given the failure of governments to follow through on pledged aid. The fact that two-thirds of the money for Obama’s plan to fight hunger in Africa is coming from a corporation with “integrity issues” may prompt further scrutiny and critiques.

FILED UNDER: Basics, Justice, Africa, agriculture, food security, Obama Administration
May 10, 2012 | 11:49 AM | By  | 

Don’t be too quick to dismiss organic farming for Africa | 

By Lisa Stiffler, special correspondent

CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture

A bean farmer tends her crop in DR Congo

One of the world’s leading advocates of the need for agricultural reform in Africa, speaking in Seattle earlier this week, said organic farming methods are already being used by poor farmers and they aren’t working. Organic farming cannot alone meet our planet’s food needs was the message.

Organic farming has lots of benefits: It doesn’t require expensive and possibly toxic pesticides; it emphasizes natural practices to build richer soils over a heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers; and it grows food that’s arguably healthier.

But when you consider that one in seven people worldwide will go to bed tonight hungry, it does seem fair to ask: Can organic deliver the goods for the developing world?

New research says yes – but not everywhere and not for everything.

WSU

“This is not an argument that organic can or cannot feed the world,” said John Reganold, regents professor of Soil Science and Agroecology at Washington State University in Pullman. “No one system can feed the world.”

A recent study in the journal Nature sought to answer the question of whether organic farming could match the output of conventional agriculture. The researchers, who did not include Reganold, compiled 316 comparisons of crops grown both ways and found that in developed nations, organic practices returned 20 percent less produce. The spread increases to 25 percent when data from developing nations are included.

But in a follow-up letter published in Nature this week, Reganold notes that the difference in yields between organic and conventional farming varies greatly between crops.  For some fruits there was only a 3 percent yield difference in the farming practices, but the spread was more than 33 percent for certain vegetables.

The answer, then, to the organic-versus-conventional debate is clear as mud.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Calestous Juma, farming, John Reganold, organic, Roy Steiner
May 9, 2012 | 11:33 AM | By  | 

Calestous Juma says Africa CAN feed itself, and the world, by harnessing new science | 

Calestous Juma is a funny guy.

Tom Paulson

Calestous Juma, center, jokes with one of his leading critics, Phil Bereano, at left

The Harvard University professor of international development is author of The New Harvest, a book (free online) in which he makes his case for how agricultural reforms offer the most promise for positively transforming African economies.

Juma spoke Tuesday at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall at an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council. Outside the event, protesters from the local organization AGRA Watch handed out leaflets challenging his views — which also were challenged in a Q&A after his talk.

There’s a good reason this jovial and charming Kenyan provokes controversy.

Juma, though entertaining, doesn’t mince words — “Africa is already doing organic farming … and it isn’t working very well.” He describes himself as a bit of ‘techno-optimist,’ a believer like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the fundamental power of science and technology to transform agriculture in poor countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

“Agricultural reform is the key to economic development in Africa, and it is already happening,” Juma said. Many African nations lead the world in economic growth rates and new approaches to old problems are transforming the continent. “Technologies destroy ideologies.”

But it is Juma’s enthusiastic support for science and technology as the key to agri-reform — indeed, to development in general — that makes him a target for those who contend such a strategy ignores, or at least glosses over, a lot of the political, economic and social reasons why so many people remain in poverty.

One of Juma’s critics, retired UW professor of technology policy Phil Bereano, asked why Juma doesn’t describe in his book all of the political work he does behind the scene with African leaders to get them to make agricultural reform a priority.

Bereano: “The reality is that these technological choices are skewed by power …. Why do you leave this out of your presentations?”

Juma: “Yes, power matters … I wrote this book as a memo to African leaders …. If these guys are not engaged, nothing will happen.”

And if he focused his book trying to provide his own perspective on African politics rather than the promise of agricultural reform, Juma said, he would have been much less effective. In short, he explained, he had to leave the power politics out of the book in order to be heard within the corridors of power.

“Nothing is perfect,” Juma had said earlier. There’s plenty to debate and lots of conflicting ideologies, he said, but he is trying to stay focused on the practicalities of finding the best solutions to Africa feeding itself — and, if things go as well as he imagines, helping to feed to world.

For more of Juma’s thoughts, and responses to his critics, listen to the audio interview above.

 

FILED UNDER: Basics, AGRA Watch, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Calestous Juma, green revolution, Phil Bereano